Allie has picked some colors for her wedding.  I wrote them on a card so that Marjorie would have them for reference.  She has been making a dress to wear to the reception.  She has worried a good deal over the color of the material that she selected.  Yesterday she found the card, and came to me feeling much relief.

"Is this your writing on this card," she asked?

"Yes."

"Oh, good.  This solves the mystery.  I've been looking everywhere for anything that is 'paige green,' and couldn't find it.  Allie's color is sage green!"

"Well how would I know?  Paige green, sage green, mauve, chartreuse--they're all the same as far as I know.  Whoever came up with these names anyway?"

"Those colors weren't in your crayon box in the first grade, were they?"

"No. I can still see all the crayons in my box:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black.  That's it."

"You had the narrow box, didn't you?"

"Yeah.  All the other colors in the big box were unnecessary, and I never could come to terms with their names."

"And I'll bet you always kept your crayons in that order, didn't you?"

"Of course.  That way I could always find them."

"All you had to do was look."

"Yeah, but that order is the way things are supposed to be.  That's the order of the colors in the rainbow.  My mother taught me the name, 'Roy G. Biv,' so that I could remember them:  red, orange, yellow ... .  But now that you mention it, I guess it is odd that a 6-year-old boy would have been particular about such a matter."

"It was always exciting to get a new box of crayons.  They had nice, sharp points."

"Yeah, it always bothered me that the points got worn down.  I always tried to color in a way that would maintain the tip, but it was hard to do when you were trying to fill in big areas on your paper.--And then you'd break them.  I hated broken crayons.--And white was a non color.  A white crayon was useless on white paper.  It was a major revelation to me to learn that white was a mixture of all the colors."

"That's what black is, isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah, I guess that makes more sense."  --(Not!)